The Bloomberg Nation

How downright scary is this?

"I have my own army in the NYPD, which is the seventh biggest army in the world.  I have my own State Department, much to Foggy Bottom's annoyance.  We have the United Nations in New York, and so we have an entree into the diplomatic world that Washington does not have." -Mayor Michael Bloomberg

The New York Observer recorded the above quote from a speech Mayor Bloomberg gave to students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on 29 November 2011.  It is simply shocking to me that he would claim such an "army" mere weeks after citizens were brutalized in the streets.  

It is only in the light of this human tragedy that burning the Occupy Wall Street Library is a lesser evil.  The obsession with power makes this seemingly moderate mayor come off as a brute.  That he would cite these powers as valuable experience for the presidency is as clear of a sign of megalomania we citizens can get from elected officials.

What is more frightening is that this admission comes only a few months after the shocking news that the NYPD has been working closely with the CIA in order to secretly spy on citizens in the years since 11 September 2001.  As the Huffington Post reports this is still going on, unabated, and without any real accountability.  Furthermore, the police department has been using its funding to spy across the tri-state area, which is clearly a violation of its jurisdiction.

These actions, taken together, make it very easy to present the case that the New York Police Department is out of control.  In addition the department and the mayor's administration have hardly offered apologies for any of these "minor" atrocities.  What happened to protecting and serving?  What happened to the democratic spirit in the governance of New York City?

George Washington?

As a new tradition, I am going to try posting something fun on Fridays from here on out.  Currently, I am in love with all things Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, so there might be a lot of their videos for the first few Fridays.  But check out the comic and youtube pages if you get a chance!  (NB: As of 11/22, that page's home video is NSFW).   Without further ado:

Thomas Jefferson: "But this is a good thing ... you don't worship the founders as I feared you might."

Random Person: "Yeah that's basically true.  Oh, except we exploded your face into a mountain."

Killing American Citizens

While this topic has certainly got a lot of (libertarian) press over at Reason, what brought it to my mind was the so-called "Commander-in-Chief" debate hosted on CBS on November 11.  During this debate, both Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney were asked about whether they would assassinate Americans like Anwar al-Awlaki.

Since I don't watch news television, I don't know to what degree the media covered the Awlaki assassination.  I imagine it was not covered very much, so I will redirect you to the above link to Reason Magazine and to the less partisan wikipedia page.  If you are not interested in reading the gory details, I will summarize the story.  Anwar al-Awlaki was a Yemeni-American who later became a popular imam and self-proclaimed anti-Western jihadist.  To be clear, he was a citizen of the United States.  He has been linked to many terrorist activities since then, including the "Underwear Bomber," the Times Square Bomber, and the Fort Hood Shooter.  For a more complete list, see the wikipedia page.  In any case, he was put on the Obama Administration's targeted assassination list in early 2010.  Thus we used drone assaults to bomb the various places the administration thought they could kill him.  In September 2011, the United States of America successfully killed him in Yemen.  Two weeks later, we killed his 16 year old son, American citizen Abdul-Rahman al-Awlaki. [More below the fold.]

We Need More Representatives Now!

To continue on yesterday's theme, I generally believe that the country would benefit from a closer adherence to the Constitution.  Thus, instead of slowly, apathetically drifting away from the rules set forth in the Constitution, perhaps we should try to think about the spirit of the document as well.  Contrary to Bill Maher, I think one of the biggest problems in government today is the lack of representation.  Instead of abolishing or completely restructuring the Senate, let's try to find ways of giving people a (slightly) more direct voice in their government.  I agree with the founders that the vox populi ought to be represented by . . . Representatives.  For some idea of how to increase representation without compromising the republican nature of our government, let's consider the issue from the founders perspective.

The framers fought contentiously over the issue of how many people should be in each Representative's perspective district.  While it was generally agreed that each state should have at least one Representative, a debate raged as to how big or small to make the final number.  In order to clarify the discussion below the fold, since ratios are fractions and, in this discussion, the numerator will always be one, the following holds: a given ratio 1:A is smaller than 1:B if and only if A is greater than B.  That is to say, the larger a ratio is in the following discussion, the resulting democracy would be more representative or more direct. [More below the fold]

Bill Maher Constitutionalism

On the November 4, 2011 episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, Bill had Delware's State Attorney General, "Beau" Biden, on to talk about how the banks are evil.  I was actually impressed with Biden III because he made the correct assertion that the recession was caused by a systemic failure of the market and even admitted to some governmental role.  But since this was only the latest of hundreds of discussions of banking on the show, it was not what piqued my interest.  Toward the end of the interview Maher, presumably looking to insult yet another guest, started berating Delaware for being a small state that the same representation in the Senate as California.  He did make sure to say that Delaware was not the worst sinner in his holier-than-thou eyes, but he said it was a wrong and stupid idea.  Beau Biden seemed, quite reasonably, taken aback by this and muttered something about how great the Founders were and how it seemed like a good policy to him.

Now, one does not have to be an astute constitutional scholar to know that the idea of a bicameral Congress was one of the great compromises that came out of the Constitutional Convention.  I am 90% sure that the problem is mentioned in the musical "1776," not to mention the numerous other media that cover that period of American History.  Indeed, when Bill Maher gets on his bully pulpit, he frequently bemoans the fact that the current Congress cannot get anything done.  So it seems to me that such an astute compromise should be looked at with great admiration.  But instead it is ridiculed and seen as one of the main reasons the Senate gets in the way of all "progress."

The oft-heard retort is that one of the Senate's main purposes is to be such a stumbling block.  That between the filibuster and the equal representation, the states with the largest populations would never be able to exercise their tyranny against the smaller states.  This argument is laughed at by those in Bill Maher's corner and reinforces their idea that there needs to be another Constitutional Convention to right these wrongs. [Continued after the fold]